Robert Dillon – The Magnificent 60s

Unusually nuanced thriller. Unusually lean, too, barely passing the 90-minute mark. There’s a Hitchcockian appreciation of the danger lurking in wide open spaces. And the background is the Middle America of annual fairs, marching bands, pie-eating competitions, rural pride in farming and marksmanship.

But there’s an undercurrent that will strike a contemporary audience. The contempt of big business for its customers. The sex trafficking, too, will sound an all-too-common note especially as the young women come from an orphanage set in the heart of homespun America in what appears to be a streamlined service.

*In the actual screen credits, Hackman was not above the title.*

We shouldn’t at all take to hitman Nick (Lee Marvin) except that he’s got a code of honor and sparing with words. He’s been sent from Chicago to Kansas to sort out with what would later be termed “extreme prejudice” Mafia boss and meat-packer Mary Ann (Gene Hackman) who’s been skimming off the top. As back-up Nick is handed a trio of young gunslingers anxious to prove themselves while his faithful chauffeur owes Nick his life.

Mary Ann doesn’t just have a factory, he has a fort, a posse of shotgun-wielding henchman standing guard. So Nick has to plunge right in and confront the miscreant. As well as dealing with animal flesh, Mary Ann has a side hustle in sex trafficking, displaying naked women in the same straw-covered pens as his beef.

Responding to a whispered “help me” by Poppy (Sissy Spacek) Nick buys her freedom, but Mary Ann isn’t for knuckling down to the high-ups in Chicago and since he’s already despatched a handful of other hoods sent on a similar mission as Nick he’s intent on turning the tables.

The action, when it comes, is remarkably low-key and all the more effective for it. Swap a crop duster for a combine harvester and the head-high prairie corn for the usual city back streets and you realize someone has dreamed up a quite original twist on the standard thriller. No need for a car chase here to elevate tension, it’s already a quite efficient slow burn.

*By the time this came out Hackman had won an Oscar for “The French Connection” (1971), Marvin already in that exalted league thanks to “Cat Ballou” (1965)*

This could be an ode to machinery. The entire credit sequence is devoted to the way machines chew up cow flesh and turn it into strings of sausages and the like. The combine harvester chews up and spits out an entire automobile, grinding the metal through its maw. And then there’s the machinery of business, the ability, at whatever cost, to give the public what it wants, in whatever kind of flesh takes its fancy.

You’ll remember the combine harvester sequence and the shootout in the cornfields, but you will come away with much more than that. Remember I mentioned nuance. Sure Mary Ann is an arrogant gangster and you’d think with hardly an ounce of humanity, but that’s until you witness his relationship with his simple-minded brother Weenie (Gregory Walcott). That could as easily have fallen into the trap of cliché sentimentality. Instead, there’s roughhouse play between the pair and it’s all the more touching for being realistic.

There’s a tiny scene where one of the young hoods asks Nick to meet his mother, in the way of a young employee wanting to show off that he was working for a top man. And Nick also goes out of his way to praise what’s on offer at the fair from a couple of women anxious for praise.

One of the tests of a good actor is what they do when they enter an unfamiliar room. Your instinct and mine, like ordinary people, would be to look around not just lock eyes on the person you’ve come to meet. So when Poppy wakes up in a luxurious hotel room she doesn’t go into all that eye-rubbing nonsense, but instead marvels at her surroundings. And although she hangs on his every word – and his arm – Nick isn’t in the seduction business, instead spoiling the young woman with expensive clothes.

There are several other scenes elevated just by touches. The credit sequence ends with a shoe appearing among the meat being processed – Mary Ann’s victims don’t sleep with the fishes but with the sausages. Poppy recalls a childhood spent in a rural wonderland, squirrels, rabbits, the splendors of nature, and reveals a lesbian relationship with another orphan Violet that is the most innocent description of love and sexual exploration you’ll ever hear.

Violet is the victim of multiple rapists. Weenie has passed her onto a bunch of down-and-outs for the price of a nickel. When Nick unclenches her clenched fist you’ll be horrified to see how many nickels tumble out.

Lee Marvin (Point Blank, 1967) is at his laconic best and Sissy Spacek (Carrie, 1976) makes a notable debut but Gene Hackman (Downhill Racer, 1969) overplays his hand.

Director Michael Ritchie (Downhill Racer) was on a roll, following this with The Candidate (1972), Smile (1975), The Bad News Bears (1976) and Semi-Tough (1977) before the execrable The Island (1980) badly damaged his career.

Written by Robert Dillon (The French Connection II, 1975).

Well worth a look.

Back to Marseilles four decades on from Borsalino (1970) and a preposterous plot that virtually sinks this fictional sequel to the factual original. For a start, French drugs kingpin Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) has a very distinctive face, and it could hardly been beyond a cop, accustomed to issuing identikits, to provide the French police and Interpol for that matter with a mugshot, thus eliminating the contention that New York cop Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is the only one who can identify him.

Throw in the fact that, unlike other U.S. exports like Jason Bourne who is fluent in several languages, Doyle is instantly at a disadvantage because, blow me down, the ordinary French citizen doesn’t speak English, ensuring that the cop comes across as one of these witless foreigners who thinks shouting louder in English makes him any more intelligible. And his sole method of detection is to simply wander the streets of a city with a population of 1.3 million hoping to catch sight of his quarry.

Doyle, being a natural rule-buster, soon causes the death of a local cop to add to the five people he’s killed (including two cops) in his home country. The bull-in-a-china-shop is so ham-fisted that it’s embarrassing rather than comedic. And the get-out-of-jail-free card is just as preposterous. Turns out Popeye is bait – this was a trope of 1960s low-budget crime or espionage movies though usually a woman was either the willing or unknowing lure – sent to Marseilles by his own bosses, in the hope that his presence will lure Charnier out of hiding, when, in fact, the Frenchman hides in very plain sight, on his very fancy yacht or dining in very fancy restaurants.

You’d have thought it would be an incredibly simple matter to feed the Charnier’s face into the police system and come up with a match which would then just involve either breaking down doors or taking the more discreet approach of catching him in the act.

What saves this, and only just, is Gene Hackman’s performance, not as the aforementioned bull, but as a junkie going cold turkey. And that in itself is reduced to only a handful of outstanding scenes, when his opposite number Barthelemy (Bernard Fresson) has to listen to his meanderings about baseball and his childhood. The action finale, the equivalent of a dam burst, where the two cops are flooded in a dry dock is good too. But, devoid of the racing automobiles, the climax drags, as Doyle sets up a later action trope of the endless footslog (which Liam Neeson probably thought he had trademarked). This doesn’t even involve any leaping or running across rooftops just a canter along busy streets, down alleys and then along the marina hoping to catch Charnier before he escapes by yacht.

It’s slim on atmosphere, too. Where the original had a down’n’dirty lived-in feel, this comes over as a tourist version of Marseilles if a tourist fancied a stroll down some mean streets. There’s a really dumb scene where Popeye, hoping to scare out the crooks in the hotel where he was imprisoned, sets fire to the place. But he goes upstairs with a jerrycan of petrol, rather than starting at the top and working is way down, no guarantee that when he reaches the roof there’s going to be any avenue of escape left open to him.

Sure, a sequel was always going to be in the works after the success of the original. But why not concentrate on the obvious follow-up, how a cache of heroin with a street value of $32 million seized by Popeye and Co managed to vanish from a police property office.

Director John Frankenheimer (The Gypsy Moths, 1969, also featuring Hackman) hadn’t had a hit in a decade. This didn’t match the original at the box office. Written by Alexander Jacobs (Point Blank, 1967) and Robert Dillon (Bikini Beach, 1964) and Laurie Dillon, their only screen work.

Disappointing.

Tag: Robert Dillon

Prime Cut (1972) ****

The French Connection 2 (1975) ***